


The Man My Father Loved

by nhpw



Category: Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 23:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nhpw/pseuds/nhpw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Alan gave Sam the keys to the arcade, he also gave up his chance to say goodbye.  Now, on his return from the Grid, Sam seeks to give his old friend the closure he never had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man My Father Loved

My father didn’t love my mother.

I mean – he did, as much as any man ever loves a woman that he spends a night of passion with, finds out he knocked up and then tries to do “the right thing.”  My father – who by 1984 had enough money to throw a big wedding party for all his friends and take my mother on a two-week honeymoon to the Bahamas – insisted on a quiet ceremony.  _My dad_ , who’d always been a bit of a loose canon, a bit of a partier… I guess some things run in the family.  Like me, he might have been rebellious and wild.  He might have had a flare for the dramatic, might have loved the public eye, but he had a private side, too.

And he had a secret.

Anyway, I… don’t really remember my mother.  Dad used to say I look just like her, and he’d show me pictures, but I’ve never seen it.  I look like him.  I always have.

What I _do_ remember is after school at ENCOM, running the halls of the building’s top floor from my father’s office to Alan’s, playing their little courier without a care in the world, never giving thought to the idea that I might be passing X-rated love notes between them.  What I _do_ remember is that beginning when I was 5, it was tradition for Alan to come over on Friday nights.  The three of us would have dinner and then watch a movie, all of us cuddled together on our squishy living room couch – Dad on my left, Alan on my right, and each of them with an arm draped ever so casually around the back of the couch.  I remember I’d fall asleep like that, between the two of them, and it just felt natural, somehow.

On Saturday mornings, I’d wake up (in my own bed, with no recollection of who might have carried me there) to watch cartoons and find Alan already at our house – sometimes whistling as he whipped up pancakes in the kitchen, sometimes writing code in a journal at the kitchen table… sometimes on the couch with the Ninja Turtles turned on, as though he’d come over just to watch cartoons with me.

It was years before I realized that he’d never actually gone home.

And then… one day when I was 7, I woke up and Dad wasn’t there, and neither was Alan.  Dad had gone to work the night before and never come home, and the man my father had quietly loved wasn’t there either.  Somehow, I felt abandoned by them both.

Of course, I recognize now that I was being a selfish fool.  It wasn’t Alan’s _job_ to be my second parent.  He filled the role because he _wanted_ to fill the role.  He was there as much as he could be.  The fact that he wasn’t there that morning didn’t mean he didn’t care about me.  It either meant he didn’t _know_ yet – entirely possible, because he hadn’t spent that night in our house – or he couldn’t come over, he just _couldn’t_ , because his heart was busy breaking.

As hard as it was for me to accept that my dad might be dead, or that he might have just run away and left us all… I know now that it was harder on Alan.  He and Dad had always been a team, and without Dad there to help support it, Alan was being crushed under the weight of ENCOM.  What’s more, he was being crushed by the burden of a broken heart.  He’d lost a business partner and friend… but he’d also lost a lover.

How it must have hurt him to watch me drift away, too.

He tried, I know he tried.  He’d still come over, take me fishing, help me with my math, throw a baseball around… but somehow, it wasn’t the same.  It was like both of us were trying to fill the holes in our hearts with pieces that didn’t quite fit.  Alan found it easier to try to cling to me.  I found it easier to break the bond that had always been fragile and not entirely self-sufficient to begin with.

And then… then came The Page, night before last… and then came the Grid.  Out of it all, I got something Alan will always have to live without – a chance to say goodbye.  He knew he might be giving that up, I think, when he gave me the keys to the arcade and sent me alone to investigate.  But he couldn’t bear to have his heart broken again… and maybe, just maybe, he was hoping that whatever I found might help heal something between us – I don’t really know.

But now I’m back, and I have to find out.

I told him in the arcade that he was right about everything, and he was.  He was right that my father would never have left me, would never have left ENCOM if he’d been given a choice.  But there was something else, too – something that had gone unsaid for much too long.

“You were right,” I say as we sit in his kitchen on high stools, the same ones I remember having trouble climbing up on when I was a child.  “Dad wouldn’t have left me.”

“I know.”  Alan’s eyes are shining with some odd match-up of wisdom and pain, and he speaks softly, the way he has for 20 years.

I take a moment to study him, to really _look_ at him – my father had gotten old, but so had Alan Bradley.  It was just that… it had happened day by day, right before my eyes, and somehow I hadn’t noticed it.  It wasn’t thrown in my face the way it was when I saw Dad on the Grid.  But Alan’s hair is gray and his eyes don’t sparkle quite as much as I remember.  The skin on his hands is dry more from age than from the weather, and there are wrinkles and creases in his face that I don’t remember being there.  He’s got to be in his 60s now, same as Dad was… or would have been.

My breath hitches as I realize for the first time that someday, someday long before I’m ready, I will lose Alan, too.  And I don’t want it to be like it was with my father – one day, he’s out of my life and the next, he’s old, and the next, he’s dead, with no connective tissue, no long-lasting memories to prop me up in his absence.  Right here in Alan’s kitchen, I make a silent vow not to let that happen.

“There’s – there’s something else, though,” I say, and my voice rumbles in my own ears, seems to echo, and it’s hard to believe but I think somehow Alan’s kitchen has become more still, so that all the world can hear my revelation.  I look up from the marble countertop to look into those gray eyes.  “He wouldn’t have left you, either.”

I get what I’m hoping for – Alan’s eyes widen in surprise, and tears spring into them, make them swim and change color in the instant before the tears begin to fall down his cheeks.

For the first time in 20 years, I reach for him and hug him close, and he hugs me back with more strength than I would’ve guessed him to have.  He cries on my shoulder, finally letting go of the tears he’s been holding at bay for 20 years.

When my father disappeared, my reaction was expected.  Everyone who knew me wasn’t surprised when I lashed out and acted out in school, when I cried, when I didn’t want to sleep alone, when I needed one more bedtime story, _just one more, Grandma, please... please don’t leave me_.  I cried all my tears, and people were there for me, to help take away my pain.  I made my life choices, good or bad, and I ran with them from that moment.  Alan… Alan didn’t have that luxury.  He suffered in silence.  He mourned alone.

“How did you know?” He finally asks, pulling back just enough to look into my eyes.

I shrug and offer a half-smile.  “How could I not?”

He hugs me again – long, lean arms and a slightly muscular chest that used to be such a contrast to Dad’s softer features, holding me the way they did when I was a child, the way they’d likely wanted to for so many years.

I’m not surprised when he doesn’t let go for a very long time.


End file.
